It has long been the practice in providing highway dividers and protective screenings along construction sites to employ elongated concrete members, having a relatively upstanding portion and flared supporting base, aligned in end-to-end relation to form an essentially continuous barrier in the area needed. The preformed sections, generally fabricated from concrete and about sixteen feet in length, are extremely heavy, requiring special equipment for transport from location to location. While quite durable as both highway dividers and screens for construction sites, these sectional highway barriers leave much to, be desired in many respects. While relatively indestructible when installed as highway divider, such barriers, when used as protective screening along construction sites, are easily damaged when being moved from place to place, and frequently must be discarded and replaced after five or six moves to different construction locations.
Highway barriers of the type described, while effectively guiding motorists in high speed travel along busy highways can cause serious damage to vehicles coming in contact with them, and they have been the cause of many serious and sometimes fatal accidents due to loss of control of moving vehicles when contacting the barriers. Furthermore, the relatively narrow profile of the barrier ends make them difficult to see in various weather conditions, and many accidents have been experienced involving head-on impact with the barrier ends.
It follows from the foregoing that both from the standpoint of installation and maintenance, and the standpoint of motorist safety, there is need for improvement in ways of providing highway barriers and protective screens for highway construction sites.
An approach to solving this problem has been disclosed and claimed in my pending patent application, Ser. No. 386,984 filed July 31, 1989. As there disclosed easy portability is provided by employing relatively short units, joined in end-to-end relation, with each unit made up of four vertically aligned members having offsets in abutting surfaces to collectively form semi spherical recesses for receiving spherical plastic bumper members which protrude from the side surfaces of the assemblage. The recesses and protruding spheres are then arranged in three rows extending longitudinally of each side of the unit, suitably in a staggered 3-4-3 or 4-3-4 arrangement.
The protruding plastic spheres provide the dual advantage of minimizing vehicle damage through a glancing contact with the barrier, and providing the motorist with an audible signal of glancing contact in time to steer away, and avoid more serious contact. Unfortunately these advantages are not equally shared by all motorists due to the wide variation in the side profile of different vehicles, and the resulting variation in the vehicle to barrier spacing which can initiate the audible warning contact. Thus even this improved type of barrier -eaves something to be desired.